


Everybody Else

by viklikesfic (v_angelique)



Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-19
Updated: 2007-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-04 13:17:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/v_angelique/pseuds/viklikesfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You can blame this one on my modernist urges and just having finished reading <i>Atonement</i>.  I'm sure the <i>Horizon</i> editor would say I have no narrative drive, but that's why I don't get paid for this.  Basically just a character study about Viggo in college.  There may be (and probably are) some inaccuracies concerning the time, the college, etc, and feel free to offer suggestions, but really this is just my excuse to ramble a bit.  I hope you enjoy it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everybody Else

At some point, during his nineteenth year of life on the planet, Viggo decided that there were two types of people in the world – beautiful Russian women, and everybody else.

Of course, it was _one_ Russian women who cued up this particular realization, a slim figure named Yelena whom he saw around campus from time to time, but never got up the nerve to speak to. She wore a bright red wool coat and both her hair and skin were of the palest shade imaginable. Sometimes she spoke in her native tongue on the pay phone in the student centre with one of the international calling cards Viggo himself used to phone Aunt Tulle or his grandfather, and he would listen to the way the Russian syllables rolled off her tongue, mentally imitating the glottal Ls and deep vowels.

But after the obsession with Yelena began, he started noticing beautiful Russians in other locations as well – in films, on campus, in literature. He decided to investigate the culture further by enrolling in a 19th century Russian literature course, and though Yelena herself was not in the course, he enjoyed himself and found a lot worth remarking on in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy (even if it could be fucking depressing).

He would think of how he might say her name as he lay in bed, atop his plain cotton sheets because he had no real need to romanticize in his daydreams, beyond the utter fact of her presence itself, which was fantastical all on its own. "Lena," he would purr, the familiar nickname perfectly pronounced as he'd been listening to Russian learner's tapes and now knew that the L was followed by a bit of a Y and could say highly useful things like, "Gde nakhoditsa bank?" which he was sure would come in handy sooner or later in his quest for pure love and understanding.

Somewhere along the way, he started smoking Pall Malls, her chosen cigarette, just in case they should ever happen to be alone at a bus stop together or something, and he could offer her a light. It appalled his mother when he came home at Christmas, for he hadn't smoked since the age of fourteen, when they'd lived in Venezuela, and she'd rather liked the hippie environmentalist bent he'd been on until he became obsessed with Yelena, which included some pot smoking but not cigarettes because they polluted the air (pot smoke, apparently, only contributed peace, love, and happiness to the ozone layer.)

The thing was, being a hippie was nothing interesting at St. Lawrence in the seventies – in fact it was the very paragon of dull. And while Viggo didn't much mind being dull, he did think that Yelena was horribly exotic with her designer clothes and her weekly trips to the city with friends and doting admirers. She was the kind of Woman who turned heads, and she did it in Gucci and Prada. So he jumped off the bandwagon and started smoking cigarettes and acting aloof and wearing thin, straight leg jeans and not eating very much. Though he rarely went to Manhattan, which from Canton might as well have been the other side of the country, he did take a few drives to Montréal and try to catch up on what the trendsetters were doing before or after a hockey game. Maybe it should have occurred to him that New Yorkers and French Canadians might not be setting the same trends, but Viggo was young and naïve. So he bought brand name dress shirts at the only store in town that sold brand name dress shirts, and when the price suddenly dropped a week later, bought two more. Again, the price dropped, but after six shirts he was out of money and he still didn't believe in credit cards.

The day he realised he had no chance with Yelena and never would, the shirts were marked down to fifteen dollars for a Super Christmas Sale and he defiantly ignored them. Instead he went to the post office, where he waited in a queue for twenty minutes in front of a grumpy old biddy who kept complaining at a moderate shout that she couldn't cut to the front of the queue to buy her stamps or pay with a credit card. It was somewhere around her complaints that Visa, unlike MasterCard, would collect her money when she "dropped dead" ("Credit cards – what a pain in the ankle!") that Viggo decided his life wasn't quite so bad after all.

After he mailed this year's paltry offering of Christmas presents, he went to cut across campus, only to find his usual way blocked by a waist-high mound of dirty snow. Thirty minutes later, he arrived at the dormitories, his hands wind-chapped and numb. A cup of hot cocoa would have been nice, but he didn't keep things like cocoa around, and so he went down to the laundry room instead.

He had to jam the coin pull several times to get it to work, and the final successful effort involved a full-body drive that ended up cutting his finger in the process. He sucked on the wound and loaded his clothing into the machine, then set it to "bright colours" and padded back up the cold stairwell once again.

When he got to his bedroom, he sat down and thought about Yelena and her punk rock boyfriend from Seattle, the man that was three inches shorter than Viggo but had a nose ring and at the same time was decidedly less weird. He was twenty-five and lived in the city, and Viggo very seriously considered swearing off Russian women entirely, giving his worldview a bit of a tweak.

But then, he reasoned, it was hardly fair to all the other beautiful Russian women out there to denigrate the entire category just for Yelena's sake. It wasn't that there weren't attractive characteristics to the quality of the Russian language or the arch of the women's cheekbones – it was just that Yelena didn't match the qualities anymore in his head.

That was when Viggo decided he didn't like labels very much.

 

"Mortensen?"

"Yes," Viggo responded boredly, pulling the curly cord of the standard-issue dormitory phone out and trying to untwist it until it was completely straight. The fact that he had attempted this feat unsuccessfully literally hundreds of times didn't faze him in the slightest. His short-term memory could be a bit fuzzy. He blamed the marijuana.

"Vih-go Mortensen?" the girl on the other end of the line repeated, so that it rhymed with pig-o.

"See, if you had just quit while you were ahead…"

"Pardon?"

He took pity on the young woman, who was obviously about to try to sell him something.

"What's your name?"

"Um, I'm Rita, sir. I was just calling to tell you about our…"

"Hello, Rita."

"Hello, sir." He heard the faint cracking of bubble gum, which was surely a strict no-no at most call centres. He admired Rita's spunk.

"What's your favourite colour?"

"Um… green." She didn't launch back into her spiel, and Viggo smiled.

"Do you speak Russian?"

"No… I speak a little Spanish, though."

"Ah, bueno. Te gusta musica?"

 

Viggo spent half an hour confusing poor Rita on the telephone, and by the time he hung up, he not only felt considerably better but decided he'd better become a hippie again. He found the remains of a dime bag in his underwear drawer and was ready to roll a joint on his desk when he remembered the laundry.

His clothes smelled clean, at least, which he considered a moderate success. The dryer was full and while he considerately piled the clothing inside into a wicker basket sitting on top of the machine, he contemplated the girl's clean knickers.

At least, he assumed it was a girl – he didn't want to make assumptions, given some of the boys in the theatre department. It definitely wasn't a girl like Yelena, as one of the pairs was bright yellow cotton with hot pink trim and an abstract design on the crotch. The wearer also clearly had a more ample posterior than his Russian obsession, who was short and extremely thin, almost to the point of heroine chic. He wondered if the underwear belonged to the plump Pakistani girl who worked at the front desk and suddenly felt a little hesitant about touching them. It wasn't that he had a problem touching knickers – he'd worn them himself, on occasion, once on a dare and then another time just for kicks – but it was more what the owner of said intimates would think, were she to suddenly walk in, that made him hesitate.

In the lint trap was a Reese's cup wrapper (another thing Yelena wouldn't be caught dead with.) As he tossed his wet clothes into the dryer, a tube of Chapstick rolled free, and it was here Viggo first considered a mixed media work. He had never tried any sort of sculpture up until this point, but something about the congealing, waxy cherry-smelling substance inside its plastic shell sitting next to a perfect circle of wrinkled gold foil on top of the dryer made him want to try new things.

Back in his bedroom, he smoked the joint while leaning out the window and then tried it, adding some twisted coat hangers and blue sticky tack to the project for flavour. It earned him a D- in intermediate studio but looking back, it was the beginning of an era.

 

As Viggo practices the idiomatic phrases he's learned for his new role, perched on the corner of a hotel room bed, he thinks of Yelena for the first time in years and laughs. After college he dated a girl for a long time, and they travelled around Europe for a while and drank and smoked dope until they were penniless, and he shifted into a modern Brit Lit phase instead of hanging back in the 19th century with Leo and Fyodor. Now, he thinks about the authors he read and he thinks about Yelena, and he murmurs a phrase to himself – "Skazhitye, pazhalsta, gde nazhoditse obsheshitiye?" – and laughs quietly.

For over time, the world has shifted, and so undoubtably has Viggo. There are still two types of people in the world, but as the figure in his bed shifts in response to his quiet foreign muttering, pulling the blanket higher up over a broad masculine hip, he realises that the types have changed considerably. There are stubborn, blonde, Yorkshire-born, Newcastle-drinking, surprisingly sensitive bastards – and then there's everybody else.


End file.
